Description de la Nigritie is a 1789 book by Antoine Edme Pruneau de Pommegorge on ‘Nigritie’, a historic and pejorative term for the western Sahel comprising Senegal, The Gambia, southern Mauretania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. The term was synonymous with another pejorative tern ‘Negroland’, used in English for the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pruneau de Pommegorge was an enslaver, employed at several French forts in West Africa for 22 years. According to the title page of this volume he served as a councillor of the assembly which governed Senegal, as commander of Fort Saint-Louis de Gregory and of the French delegation to the Kingdom of Whydah (now part of Benin), which assisted Europeans in enslaving thousands of Africans until the mid-nineteenth century. This book, dedicated to the Académie Française, contains a detailed account of the River Niger and the kingdoms of West Africa in the late eighteenth century. It also describes French involvement in the enslavement and transportation of Africans to North America and the Caribbean. Around the time of this book’s publication, each year some 13,000 Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas to work in French colonies, particularly Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and French Guiana. Enslavement was abolished in France in 1794 following the French Revolution but it was reintroduced by Napoleon I in 1802. He abolished the slave trade in 1815 and the decision was formally reiterated by Louis XVIII in 1818. Enslavement was finally abolished in France and its overseas empire in 1848.